


Ghosts

by pickleplum



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Sentient Jaegers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-14
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pickleplum/pseuds/pickleplum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What they don’t tell you at the Jaeger Academy is that every Drift in a Jaeger is three-way: Right hemisphere, left hemisphere, and the Jaeger itself. The Jaeger isn’t just the platform for the Drift, she is a full partner in the neural handshake. She has a mind and memories of her own. It only makes sense. She grew up as a human, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapenka

Chapeka Alexandrova was a teacher in Vladivostok. She was young and fit and wanted to protect more than the handful of children placed in her custody every day. When the city’s Shatterdome opened and construction began on the first of the Russian Jaegers, she applied for work. All potential employees were screened for Drift compatibility and Chapeka found she was one of the rarest of the rare; She was universally compatible. That talent made her too valuable to be a pilot or to work in any frontline position. The scientists building the Jaegers spoke to her of the contribution she could make to the kaiju war and the sacrifice it would require. She didn’t hesitate. This was a better opportunity than she could ever have hoped. Her neural pathways were mapped and her memories downloaded to the quantum biocomputer nestled deep within the Mark I’s chest. Her new body was heavy and slow, but amazingly hardy and terribly strong. _Cherno Alpha_ was not graceful, but Chapeka had never wanted to be a dancer. She wanted to be someone who could keep children safe. Linked with the Wolf and the Bear she fought longer, harder, and more successfully than almost anyone else involved in the Jaeger program. While she walked the Siberian coastline, no kaiju reached the cities. As she and the Wolf and the Bear drowned in the Hong Kong harbor she pushed aside her disappointment at not bringing one of the kaiju into death with herself and guided her pilots to memories of warmth and love.


	2. Stacie

No one in their right mind would take someone like Stacie Ewing into the military, so it was a good thing for her that the PPDC was desperate when she came calling. She had been a different woman since her family was killed in a kaiju attack. She gave up her teaching job and was always defiant and always fighting, but she still had something the PPDC wanted desperately. She was universally compatible. They made their offer and she accepted. No more parents and children needed to be hurt or separated. Not with her fighting in the most powerful Jaeger ever built. _Striker Eureka_ was fast and strong and she traveled the Pacific rim with the Hansens. Like all Jaegers and unlike her pilots she did not feel pain as claws and teeth raked across her armor time and time again and she did her best to shield the Hansens from feeling her damage. She punched and stabbed and grappled and threw kaiju, letting Chuck’s rage feed back into her own which made them even stronger. Together, they established the record for most solo kaiju kills by a Jaeger team. She shared Chuck’s frustration as _Cherno_ and _Crimson_ died in front of her and screamed when the EMP froze them.

She woke up back in the Hong Kong Shatterdome with Chuck and a new pilot who was too bloody calm for her tastes. Still, a pilot was a pilot and this was the most important mission of all. Besides, Chuck was actually _impressed_ with the new guy. That was good enough for _Striker._ They would get this done. She and _Gipsy_ walked across the ocean floor unmolested until they were nearly at the target. Then the two Category IVs turned on _Gipsy_ and the Category V attacked her and Chuck and the new guy. They punched and stabbed and grappled, but the bastard was strong. Maybe they were losing, but, dammit, they were hurting the monster, _badly,_ so she grinned when it called for help after they half-severed its forelegs. _Striker_ knew she was too damaged to complete the mission as written and she knew as soon as her pilots did that the only answer was to use themselves as both bait and a trap. At least I’ll take one or both of you alien bastards with me, she said to herself. No one but the kaiju saw it, but _Striker’s_ last movement was purely her own. She gave the Category V a two-finger salute. If she had lips, she would have smirked in the instant before detonation.


	3. Grace

Before she took on blue armor and a gold visor, _Gipsy Danger_ called herself Grace Davenport. She was forty-two years old and living in Petaluma when the Air Force destroyed Oakland and her three kids to stop Trespasser. When the Pan Pacific Defense Corps began recruiting, she was among the first to sign on. A teacher, programmer and a former amateur mixed martial arts fighter, she was exactly what they were looking for. She took a post at The Icebox in Anchorage, working in LOCCENT. She was very good at her job, but she wanted to do more. Grace was too old to be a pilot, so she volunteered to fight in a different way as soon as an opportunity opened. Her Mark III body would allow her to protect children around the world and her boys, the Becket brothers. She laughed when she heard her new voice the first time. She sounded like the crazy computer in that video game her daughter loved so much. Knifehead surprised her as much as he did the boys. As Yancy was torn from her, she threw all of her strength and comfort into Raleigh and pulled as much of his pain into herself as she could. _Gipsy_ had lost her blood children and Yancy but she would not lose Raleigh. For five hours she walked through the sea, blinded by injury and a storm to reach the shore. The entire time, she spoke to Raleigh, keeping him conscious, keeping him moving. When they finally made it to the beach, she fell slowly, cushioning her boy against the impact as best she could.

Five years later, she came online again. Raleigh was there, alive, well, and full of hope. With him was a young woman full of anger and a steely determination whom _Gipsy_ liked immediately. She is like me all those years ago, she thought. Her girl lost herself in the Drift, but _Gipsy_ was too groggy from years of sleep to wrest control of the cannon from her and berated herself for her weakness. Power disconnected and slowly falling asleep, she wailed, fearing that she will be deactivated again, without having a chance to connect with Raleigh and her girl--Mako--again. She blinked to readiness again that evening and her kids told her two Category IVs waited for them in the harbor. Her Jaeger comrades were already destroyed or incapacitated. They can do this, she told the pilots. She and Raleigh came back from the dead. Mako survived when no one else did. They are unstoppable, _Gipsy_ said. They proved they were by doing what was supposed to be impossible.

The next day they were on the floor of the Pacific Ocean following _Striker Eureka_ to the edge of the Breach. The skinny kaiju ripped off their arm and the horned one crushed their knee. _Gipsy_ broke some of her own kinesthetic relays to keep her kids from feeling all of the pain and sealed as many of her leaking fuel and hydraulic lines as she could. They needed to keep moving forward. She was not going to fail her kids again. She was going to save every kid in the world. When the skinny one charged again, if _Gipsy_ moved faster to wield her sword than her specifications said she should be able to, no one said anything. _Striker_ and her boys blew themselves apart to give them the shot at the Breach. Facing the Category V, _Gipsy_ subtly corrected her kids’ aim on the final leap by misfiring one of their jets. She had almost no control over her body as they dropped into the Breach. She slowed Mako’s oxygen leak, but couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t heal enough circuit damage for Raleigh to start the core meltdown with the computer. She did put some extra force behind Raleigh’s escape pod to ensure it cleared the blast. She had done all she could.

Goodbye, she thought. We did it. Together.


	4. Chan-juan

Once the orphanage was gone, Tou Chan-juan was unsure of what to do. She had followed her husband to Manila five years earlier when he found work in that city’s port. Chan-juan found employment as a cook and quickly earned her way to managing the entire kitchen, where her quick wit and ruthless multitasking ensured that all one hundred and twenty-six of her little charges were properly fed and their meals were ready on time. When the monster struck the city it was with the force of an earthquake. The port was leveled along with the slum that hosted the orphanage. Chan-juan and three of the children were the only survivors in the compound. With nothing left in Manila but nightmares, she moved back to her family’s home in Shenzhen. 

Even though she was already too old to be a soldier, the PPDC provided her with a new calling and she joined the Corps as soon as recruiters appeared in the city. She could not fight, but she could cook and was put to work in the kitchens of Hong Kong’s new Shatterdome. Chan-juan made sure all of the pilots, trainees, technicians, and other staff are well fed and fed on time. She forgot about the Drift compatibility test she took when she enlisted until the scientists arrived and spoke to her about an opportunity for which she was especially qualified. A unique Jaeger was under construction, custom-built for a set of triplets. They were good fighters, but sometimes lacked focus. The new pilots needed her organization, her discipline, and even her flair with a kitchen knife. She agreed to help, even though the idea of four minds together struck her as unlucky.

_Crimson Typhoon_ defended her adopted home seven times and other cities nearly as often. The effort she and her children made kept the flow of good food into Hong Kong uninterrupted. Everyone ate well while _Crimson_ minded the harbor. Maybe, she thought, their four was only unlucky for the kaiju.

The night two kaiju approached the harbor, she stood at the Miracle Mile with her old friends _Cherno_ and _Striker_ waiting and ready for the fight. The long one, though, was faster and stronger than any they fought before. Even with _Cherno’s_ help, they weren’t enough. The thing’s tail claws tore her Conn-pod and her triplets away. Their separation was sudden and brutal. All she could do was shift her center of balance to fall away from _Cherno_ and pray the Russian and _Striker_ would protect her city, now that her skill was not enough and her luck had run out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to [rathrunpredictabl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rathrunpredictabl/pseuds/rathrunpredictabl) for basically outlining this for me.


	5. Charity

Charity Tsukuda was always a little different, not that she minded. She knew perfectly well who and what she was. An Olympic-class archer, she taught art at a local primary school because it combined a pair of her interests--children and making things--and paid enough to keep her in decent equipment. K-Day and the U.S. archery association’s insistence on complicating Charity’s very simple identity scuttled her Olympic dreams. The PPDC, though, didn’t care about her history, only the skills she could bring them. They put her to work designing recruitment and promotional posters until the Jaeger builders called. Her universal compatibility was what they wanted now.

 _Coyote Tango_ loved that her pilots were a male-female pair. That struck her as absolutely perfect. Stacker and Tamsin were sad and fought with a desperate determination to protect others from losing as much as they had. She felt their loneliness and hope and held it tightly, using it as motivation to fight longer and harder.

With each fight, she felt Tamsin growing weaker. Something was eating away at her beside her sadness. The same thing nibbled at the edges of Stacker. _Coyote_ took on more and more of the strain of fighting as time went on, able, for at least a little while, to ease her pilots’ suffering. During the battle in Tokyo, however, _Coyote’s_ efforts were no longer good enough. The kaiju kept running away, crushing buildings as it went. She pushed herself to keep up, but Command finally had to send Jumphawks to carry her to a position in front of the monster. 

Everything went wrong as they took their first steps upon landing. Tamsin snapped out of the neural handshake, her mind disrupted by a seizure, leaving Stacker and _Coyote_ to face the charging kaiju without her. Stacker grabbed control while _Coyote_ split her efforts between fighting with him and doing what she could to comfort and support Tamsin, who had quickly regained consciousness although she remained outside of the Drift. _Coyote_ couldn’t speak to Tamsin or touch her mind, but she used her connection with the woman’s circuitry suit to wrap her in warmth and a soft vibration like a cat’s purr. Finally, the kaiju died after being struck by two finely aimed shots from _Coyote’s_ cannons. As Stacker disconnected from the Drift, leaving _Coyote_ alone in her mind, she continued hugging Tamsin and saw the girl in the blue coat step out from the alley. Another survivor like her pilots, she thought. Another life saved.

The next time _Coyote_ awoke, it was in test mode in the Tokyo Jaeger bay. Two new pilots Drifted with her. She asked them about Stacker and Tamsin, but they had no answer beside ‘gone’ for her. _Coyote_ tried to convince herself that pilots were pilots, but she missed Stacker and Tamsin and the way the three of them had interacted. Her sadness didn’t affect her willingness or commitment to fighting, just as it hadn’t weakened her first pilots.


	6. Lestari

For Lestari Setiawan the PPDC offered a lifeline as the economic depression strangled opportunities for work to support her five siblings. The recruiters were initially unimpressed with her. She was too small, uneducated, and unskilled. But if Lestari was anything, she was tenacious. She wore the men down. They finally let her enlist and put her to work in the kitchens at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Being away from her family was difficult, but the pay was good and the money she sent home allowed her family to move to a safer part of their city.

Like most employees, the Drift compatibility test for her was only a formality and quickly forgotten. Unlike most PPDC employees, however, Lestari was universally compatible, so the scientists from Sydney were interested in talking to her about a chance to do more to protect her family. With a promise that her brothers and sisters would be taken care of after she was gone, she agreed. Meeting the Hansen brothers gave her even more confidence in her decision. They were brave and fought hard and dirty. She loved them like her own siblings.

It all changed during what should have been a routine fight. One of Scott’s memories flitted through their minds. For _Lucky Seven_ it was nothing she hadn’t seen dozens of times in the slums, but to Herc it was confidence-shattering. His alignment slipped sideways, then out. _Lucky_ staggered. No! This isn’t worth dying for! Get up and fight! If you can’t trust each other, at least trust me and fight! _Lucky_ shouted. Scott tried to right them, pull Herc back into the present as the kaiju clawed away at them, its roars echoing through the Conn-pod. _Lucky_ forced them into a defensive stance. Her movements were slow and her punches weak without the efforts of both her pilots. The kaiju pounded her to her knees. The monster was ready to crush her head in its jaws when the other Jaeger on deployment shoved it away. Herc regained his control as the alarms shrieked. They lurched upright, every joint screaming at the effort and hemorrhaging hydraulic fluid. If they kaiju turned back to them, they would surely be killed, but they would at least meet their end on their feet. Thankfully, perhaps, the other Jaeger tore the beast to pieces. 

The flight back to the Shatterdome was silent. The Hansens wouldn’t even look at each other. _Lucky_ hurt too much to speak, but she sent calming and peaceful thoughts to her pilots. That evening the technicians disconnected her power, as usual, and _Lucky_ fell asleep thinking of what she would say to the brothers when she was repaired and they fought together again. She would never wake up. Her unconscious body was transported to Oblivion Bay in the morning and left to the weather.

Herc, though, never forgot how she had saved them and how she comforted them after the fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally found my headcanon for why Herc wears a _Lucky Seven_ vest in Hong Kong.


	7. Rachel

The plans for the first American Jaeger were announced with great fanfare. She would be big and blue and brave. Her pilots were already selected, but scientists in charge of her programming were scrambling to find a universally compatible volunteer to form her core. They found her in one of the early Ranger candidates named Rachel Buajan. She was a self-defense instructor, triathlete, and amateur boxer with boundless energy. They thought she would be a perfect complement to the Gage twins as _Romeo Blue._ The irony of her codename was not lost on her. Then again, Romeo (or Juliet, for that matter) would get awful blue hoping for anything more than a nose rub from her, so maybe it was appropriate.

The twins were very good about sharing their celebrity and the adulation they received with their crew and _Romeo._ She was a star and she reveled in the parades and parties as much as she relished the fights. Victories alone and with others followed one after another.

One stormy night in February, _Romeo_ went out to meet a kaiju off the west coast, but the damned thing slipped past her at the ten mile line and raced toward Anchorage. The Jumphawks couldn’t reach her because of the weather, so she had to walk back to Seattle. On the slog, they heard the announcement from Anchorage LOCCENT that _Gipsy Danger_ had taken on the kaiju alone and killed it, but only after the death of one of her pilots. _Gipsy_ walked to shore and collapsed, horribly damaged, with a comatose pilot. The twins were nearly sick at the news and it badly rattled _Romeo,_ too. If they had been just a little faster, they may have been able to stop the kaiju at their line or gotten transport so they could’ve fought alongside _Gipsy._ They could’ve turned the tide and saved _Gipsy_ and her pilots.

The failure haunted _Romeo_ at every fight and every time the news of another Jaeger’s or pilot’s death reached her. She fought harder because of it, until the time finally came when help was too slow arriving to help her.


	8. Boyana

She is born into a family of soldiers, so it is no surprise when Boyana Yanev drops out of her college courses and enlists in the PPDC. Her parents are both proud and disappointed. They are proud of bravery and commitment, but saddened because they had hoped their only child would be spared from wartime service.

She earns top marks in all of the physical and mental test they throw at her. The only woman ranked in the top ten, her fellow cadets accuse her of sleeping her way to her exalted rank. She shrugs. “I’m only doing the best I can,” she says.

The final cut sees her chosen as one of the test pilots for the prototype kaiju-fighting machine, the as-yet-unchristened Jaeger that occupies the enormous hangar at the center of the Kodiak base. The thing was not classically beautiful, what with its short legs and broad torso, but it was strong and that was all that mattered when it came to enemies like the kaiju.

Boyana looks forward to her chance at the controls. Or, maybe she should say, her chance _as_ the controls. The machine would mimic her movements, nearly reading her thoughts, after all.

Then, just days before her turn with the Jaeger, the first pilot, Captain Adam Casey, dies. The neural interface overloaded his brain almost immediately and killed him. The project heads understandably delay Boyana’s test. 

Her test date is rescheduled and finally arrives. The scientists assure her that they’ve compensated for the neural load which killed Casey. She’ll be fine, they say. 

They are wrong, of course. 

She holds on longer than Casey did and the Jaeger’s fingers twitch, but then her vision dazzles and begins to go red around the margins. At the edge of her consciousness, she’s dimly aware of one of the scientists--she doesn’t know his name; There were so many of them--typing frantically at a workstation. The pressure on her mind lessens, but she hears alarms before everything goes black.

She expects to see the white ceiling of a hospital room when she wakes. Instead, she is faced with the inside of the Jaeger testing hangar, overlaid with a pilot’s HUD. What’s happened? Did the interface work after all? She tries to flex the Jaeger’s--her--fingers, but nothing happens. She can’t feel her limbs at all. Even paralyzed, she hears two of the scientists arguing in the control room.

“Captain Yanev is _in that Jaeger!_ I saved her neural patterns to core computer before brain death occurred,” the younger one--the one she remembers typing as she lost consciousness--shouts.

 _“That’s impossible!_ No one has downloaded a mind before, even under the most carefully prepared conditions, and you claim to have done so with improvised code and equipment. Such arrogance! I expect better from you.”

The younger man’s voice goes tight. “Do you have another explanation for why the sensors are registering neural activity in the Jaeger even though no pilot is connected?”

“It is likely a defective sensor,” the older one says dismissively. “We’ll have the techs replace it. I see no reason to postpone tomorrow’s test with Lieutenant D’onofrio.”

“We _must_ postpone it! We have no idea what will happen if we mingle neural patterns! It may hurt the Lieutenant or kill the Captain!”

“She’s already dead!” She hears the older man’s voice fade as he leaves the control room. “Now give up this nonsense and finish debugging the code for the shoulder actuators.”

The younger man mumbles something she doesn’t catch as he turns off her power supply and she falls asleep.

The next day begins the same way: with a view of the hangar and HUD. Then someone’s mind and memories collide with hers. She recognizes the young man in the snapshots which flit past. Sergio D’onofrio is attempting to interface with the Jaeger and with her. Although she’ll never be able to explain it, what she does next feels perfectly natural. She allows D’onofrio’s memories to wash over hers then waits for him to decide they should do next. He wills the Jaeger to take a step forward. Boyana matches her will to his. The machine steps forward. Again. And again.

She recognizes the wave of panic from D’onofrio as his mind begins to break under the neural load and feels about her systems wildly, trying to find some way to shunt some of the weight away from him. The Jaeger stumbles and falls to its knees, but Boyana keeps it from fully collapsing. When a second consciousness touches hers, D’onofrio stabilizes and Boyana relaxes her iron grip on the Jaeger. She recognizes the newcomer as Doctor Lightcap. Together, the three of them gently guide the Jaeger back to her feet.

They take several steps forward. Raise their arms. Clench their fists. Boyana and Sergio lead the motions, repeating the calibration forms they drilled until they became second nature. They run the entire set, then walk backwards into the Jaeger’s dock.

Before Sergio and Caitlin disconnect, she hears the wild cheers of the watchers in the control room. They had done it.

When she wakes next, she hears the doubts of the men in the control room. They aren’t ready, they say. This is suicide, they shout, but _Brawler Yukon_ and Sergio are confident and Caitlin’s excitement is infectious. The flight to Vancouver take longer than the battle. 

The first Jaeger deployment is the first Jaeger victory. Humanity has a chance again.

 _Brawler_ is glad to be a part of it and never regrets volunteering for the Jaeger tests or the accident that traps her inside the machine. She is a soldier. Soldiers fight and protect those who cannot defend themselves. She is content.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [the prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/350.html?thread=107358#t107358):  
> “The Jaegars are sentient beings each housing the spirit of a human. So maybe Gipsy Danger has Raleigh and Yancy's mom, Chuck's mom is in Striker Eureka, etc etc”
> 
> I thought the idea the Jaeger ‘ghosts’ were universally compatible volunteers was a better explanation for the human-based sentience than someone connected to a specific pilot team, especially since some Jaegers worked with more than one set of pilots _(Coyote Tango_ and _Striker Eureka_ being examples) and some pilots worked with more than one Jaeger (Herc with _Lucky Seven_ and _Striker Eureka)._
> 
> ETA: Went back in and broke this up into chapters to make it easier for me to add more Jaegers and their stories.
> 
> Music to set the mood: [Björk, _Post_ , Track 1, “Army of Me”](http://youtu.be/3biZkA-TNvs)


End file.
